Ducts are essential to a wide variety of structures including residential, commercial, industrial, and governmental structures. For example, they may carry water, house fiber optic cables or other communications or power lines, or participate in critical pneumatic systems aboard vehicles. Ducts often experience high volumes of throughput, frequent changes in positioning, connectivity or conducted materials, or other conditions or changes that require them to be locatable for maintenance and other activities to be performed.
Existing duct systems are not designed so that individual duct lines can be located with ease and accuracy, particularly in applications where the lines are obscured from sight by obstructions such as soil in which such lines are buried. As such, significant expenses may be incurred in attempts to locate ducts, or in correcting work done based on erroneous information provided by or about existing duct systems. One existing method of locating a duct requires burying or otherwise placing a “tracer” or similar wire alongside the duct, for example during construction. Even though in certain applications the tracer wire may be attached to the duct before the duct is placed, there are several sources of potential error in using this method. These include the possibility that the positioning of the tracer wire on the duct will be disturbed during placement, or that the means for locating the tracer wire may hit on other metal objects and thus provide false positives for the location of the duct.
Further, in many existing systems, there remains the possibility that the tracer wire or similar device will become disassociated from the duct or otherwise damaged during or after the construction process, thus preventing accurate location of the duct. Such systems often have no economical way to provide redundancy in functionality, and failure of a tracer wire at any given location may cause failure of the entire location mechanism. Finally, there is no existing method for identifying individual, obscured duct sections or for obtaining similar specific information regarding the duct system's location and state.
The present inventive concept provides an improved duct system and a method for using same for mapping and location purposes.